


saudade

by oryx



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-25 23:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4981153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oryx/pseuds/oryx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life with Amalgamates takes some getting used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	saudade

Doggo doesn’t remember much about the past.  
   
The older a memory gets the less it moves, after all, gradually losing its vibrance and immediacy. And once you start to forget how the air smelled on that day, or the exact pitch of someone’s bark, then a memory might as well just be a series of faded photos in the back of your mind.  
   
And Doggo can’t see those, no matter how important they might be.  
   
Doggo has a feeling he will never forget Endogeny, though, no matter what might happen in the future. The way they move is so different from anything else he’s seen – undulating, flowing, their many empty faces trembling and collapsing in upon themselves only to reform a moment later. They have no mouths where mouths should be, but on rare occasion he catches a glimpse of one moving across their flesh, brimming with teeth that are thin and sharp like needles.  
   
(But they always manage to bring the stick back when a human plays fetch with them. That’s all that really matters, if you ask Doggo.)  
   
They lick his paw one day. Just a friendly gesture, he’s sure. Lesser Dog often does the same. But even so, he feels like he remembers something, then. Softness. Warmth. A comforting sense of safety and peace. A paw on his shoulder, and a familiar voice saying “you’re a good boy, aren’t you, Doggo – ”  
   
He tilts his head at Endogeny. They tilt several of their heads in return.  
   
No, Doggo thinks. He’s probably just imagining things.  
   
All this movement is getting him overexcited again.  
   
  
   
  
   
His stand-up routines are getting a lot better, he thinks. At the last open mic night he went to, he got at least three humans to laugh! Maybe even four! (He’d gone home after and immediately told his dad, who had “hmph”ed and muttered “what’s so great about that?” But he’d smiled a bit as he said it.)  
   
Snow has realized that his old material… Well, it just wasn’t very good. No wonder he never got much of an audience. It was too predictable, too stale, without the edge or biting wit that attracts a modern crowd. The comedy scene is ever-evolving, you see. A drake has to keep on his toes and keep the fresh material coming, or risk becoming obsolete.  
   
But he still takes the time to write a few of those old, silly jokes.  
   
Someone still enjoys them, after all.  
   
She isn’t always there. Not visibly, at least. She fades away, sometimes, and the only way to know if she’s present is to feel the temperature in a room, which drops by at least ten degrees whenever she’s near. He’s fairly sure that he walked through her once. He’s not sure what else could possibly make him feel like _that_ – like every ounce of life and magic had just been drained from his body, a grey fog lying heavy over his thoughts, a choking numbness seizing his throat. His kind have little regard for the cold, but in that moment he’d felt it deeply, as if there were ice forming all inside him, crystals of frost creeping in around the edges of his vision.  
   
Since then, he’s been extra careful when walking around the house.  
   
She shows up for dinner that night. Dad is working late, so it’s just the two of them. Snow tells her about his day at school, which was actually _super_ lame, but he embellishes a few details here and there. Invents himself a cool new friend. Tells a story about his history teacher that’s maybe not entirely true. Anything to see that smile of hers, lopsided and eerie though it might be.  
   
“Here’s one,” he says. “What happened when the icicle landed on the snowman’s head?” A beat. “It knocked him out cold!”  
   
Her smile widens further as she laughs. The sound scratches like claws at his ears, low and staticky and discordant, but if he listens close he can hear something else beneath it. Something sweet and achingly familiar.  
   
_I’m glad you’re here, mom_ , is what he’d like to say, but he tells another bad joke instead.  
   
  
   
  
   
Here is a memory:  
   
The two of them, years and years ago, playing with three other children amid the glowing pools and Echo Flowers. The others vetting suggestions for what game they should play next, and the way she’d tried give her opinion only to be talked over and ignored again and again.  
   
Her sister, spines bristling, slapping one of them in the back of the head with her fin. “My sister’s not done talking yet,” she’d said, with the kind of righteous fury that stops people dead in their tracks.  
   
She was everything Shyren wasn’t. Bold. Outspoken. Her singing almost painfully beautiful.  
   
(When she fell, it was like the whole world ground to a halt.)  
   
To have her back after all this time – not just her, though, jumbled together with pieces of others as she is – is a strange feeling at best. She looks and acts so different than the sister Shyren remembers. The sister who was her hero, her light. She moves with an inelegant shamble, now. Her fangs gleam wetly in her broad, gaping mouth. The things she says are often inexplicable – obtuse, haunting messages that worry at that back of Shyren’s mind. Her voice seems to echo from everywhere and yet nowhere at all.  
   
And yet still, whenever Shyren begins to hum that old, nostalgic melody,  
   
her sister hums it back.


End file.
